Women in Technology – Accelerated Career Experiences (WiT-ACE), a one-year old social-impact organisation, has managed to raise $1 million in its first seed fund round. This investment will be used by the women’s skilling and employment platform to further its expansion plans and enter into strategic partnerships. This round, led by the founders of CitiusTech, was supported by Dexter Capital. CP Gurnani, CEO of Tech Mahindra is also one of the investors.
The organisation, which focusses on increasing women’s participation in the STEM workforce, has begun working with over 100 companies to engage, enable and employ women in decision making through its digital platform and virtual products. Through its various industry-government-academic tie-ups, WiT-ACE is trying to ensure policy and education impact in the industry.
“The 100+ clients engaged with over 200k women on the platform, in less than 11 months in one of the toughest years for business, gives us a good grip of industry needs and the confidence to grow this organisation to the next phase of exponential growth.”
Anuranjita Kumar, founder, WiT-ACE
The goal of WiT-ACE is to ensure that at least 50 per cent of decision-making roles are essayed by women. To make this happen, the organisations intends to strengthen the current weak talent pipeline in the industry through focused skilling for women at all stages. The ultimate aim is to check the falling rates of professional women in the workforce and push up the numbers pan India by infusing at least a million skilled women into the workforce over next four to five years.
Anuranjita Kumar, founder, WiT-ACE, feels, “The 100+ clients engaged with over 200k women on the platform, in less than 11 months in one of the toughest years for business, gives us a good grip of industry needs and the confidence to grow this organisation to the next phase of exponential growth.”
Kumar shares that the organisations is “focused on progressive and measurable impact on bridging gender gaps, through skilling and employment that will lead the transformation.” She is confident that with the support from its partners “will be the much-required springboard towards achieving our target of impacting 20million women by 2025.”
Jagdish Moorjani, COO, CitiusTech, is pleased with the progress WiT-ACE has made in such a short span of time. He is impressed with the way “WiT-ACE has multiple tracks parallelly focused on developing women as front runners to lead the organisations of tomorrow.”
CP Gurnani, CEO & MD, Tech Mahindra, has faith in the initiatives led by WiT-ACE, which he feels are “truly inspiring” and he looks forward “to the next phase of their efforts towards enabling a gender-equal and inclusive future.”
Sumita Ambasta, founder and executive director, Flowering Tree Inc. and founder & trustee, Plaksha, points out that that female workforce participation in India has been declining from an already low 35 per cent in 2010 to 20 per cent in 2020. Women make up hardly 1 per cent of the C-suite roles. She rightly says “These facts reveal the immense work and potential ahead of an organisation like WiT-ACE.” Partnering with WiT-ACE will help “catalyse a workplace diversity revolution.”
